Our group will focus on the dynamics of climate change discourse in the media, among the online public, and political actors. Specifically, we will examine three aspects of public discourse: (a) collective attention––the shared focus of a group or society on a particular topic, event, or issue at a given time; (b) collective memory––the associations made between current and past events in media articles, online search queries, or political speeches and (c) framing––the persuasive aspect of “how” issues are discussed and the political logic and cultural frameworks it is related to.

Longer-lasting meteorological and hydrological droughts are foreseeable in Germany, with direct implications for the storage and access to water in cities. Furthermore, an increased risk of conflicts over water allocation between urban and rural areas is expected. Within this context, Thirsty Cities investigates pathways for enhancing the resilience to water scarcity in Germany. A focus is given to the impacts of the shortage of freshwater and the assessment of whether current regulatory frameworks are “fit for purpose”.

Hydroclimatic extremes under climate change seriously threaten society and the environment. The prevailing focus on single hazards fails to capture the complex interplay among drivers behind extreme impacts, potentially leading to maladaptation. The SEESAW PhD cohort aims to improve our current understanding of the interactions between hydroclimatic extremes and their complex impacts on society and the environment by 1) uncovering the non-linear relationships between hydroclimatic hazards, 2) quantifying the impacts of these hazards and 3) disentangling the role of human-induced climate change play in their generation at national and continental scales.
 

 Extreme climate events routinely cause adverse environmental and socio-economic impacts. Mitigating these impacts requires understanding how they link to climatic drivers. However, existing freely-available climate hazard impact databases are often designed for rapid reporting and have limitations in terms of completeness and accuracy. While a wealth of detailed climate impact information is available from online text sources such as news websites and reports, its extraction by human experts is time-consuming, and they are thus not typically used in impact databases.

We seek to overcome this gap by producing a holistic European multi-sector impacts database of climate extremes, from mining of online text sources. We will consider extreme events such as windstorms, droughts, floods and temperatures extremes. By using NLP techniques, each extreme event will be assigned a date range, location and socio-economic and environmental impacts. These will then be cross-checked against climate data.

In this project, we address the increasing impacts of hydrological extremes, such as floods and droughts, by investigating their driving factors: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation. Focusing on the Central European river basins (e.g., Danube, Rhine, Elbe, Weser, Oder), the project employs a dual temporal perspective—spanning 500 years of historical data and contemporary records since 1990.

EXTREME-ADAPT overarching ambition is to offer a systemic perspective on the historical and contemporary factors influencing flood and drought risk in Central Europe. This interdisciplinary project bridges AI, engineering, and hydroclimatology to provide actionable insights for climate adaptation.